1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to integrating communications services, and in particular to managing services and applications using telephone numbers as common subscriber identifiers.
2. Description of the Related Art
Even with the explosive growth in new communications technologies and service offerings, telecommunications service providers still have large numbers of customers with traditional analog telephone service. For these customers, the telephone number remains the universal identifier (ID) for communicating with the outside world.
As the availability of new technologies has spread, increasing numbers of customers wish to add services and applications to their existing telephone service. However, many services and applications are supplied by third-party providers in different ecosystems. These third-party ecosystems often use different types of IDs and have different rules and policies for managing and activating their services and applications.
In view of the above, new techniques for integrating advanced services and applications with legacy telephone service are desired.